The present disclosure relates to access control, and more specifically, to access control for hardware resources. Computing capacity requirement increases as cognitive computing, artificial intelligence (AI), big data, computationally intensive applications and the like become popular. However, general-purpose processors are unable to meet the increasingly growing requirement of the computing capacity. In this case, more powerful hardware accelerators, such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), have been developed for use in the environment with a heavy demand on the computing capacity, such as the cloud computing environment. However, conventional designs for hardware accelerators are insufficient to guarantee the security of the hardware accelerators.